Style Guidance Official Blog

Style Guidance Style and Fashion Newsletter Launch

We’ve decided to launch a newsletter for all the folks interested in improving their looks.

Big deal right? Plenty of other sites have them.

Well…yes and no. It seems that all the fashion/style newsletters out there seem to be focused on the high fashion. They report on the fashion shows, they tell you about all the expensive dresses that the celebrities wear. But they don’t really tell you anything you can actually use in the real world.

Which is where our newsletter will come in. Our vision for the newsletter, is to give you information that you can actually use in your day to day life. And just like the main website, the focus will be on style, fashion, beauty and shopping tips/discounts.

As with our main site, we’ll be giving back to the community. So there’ll be plenty of prizes and giveaways specifically for the newsletter subscribers. Everything from electronics like iPads, to fashion accessories. Unlike the main site, you won’t actually have to do anything to participate, just subscribe.  Similar to the main website, the prizes will be awarded on a weekly basis.

To get things started, we’ll release one newsletter a week. The newsletter will go out on Fridays, so that you’ll have something to read before the weekend. But that’s just the start, eventually we’ll want to turn this into a daily newsletter…so you’ll have something new to read every day.

So how can you help?

Well first and foremost, you should go to http://styleguidance.com and signup for the newsletter. There is only 1 field…for your email, so it’ll literally take 1 second to signup.

We would also appreciate if you can let 10 friends know about the newsletter. Post on your facebook wall, tweet it out, email them. Help us spread the word. The faster our newsletter grows, the sooner we’ll be able to arrange exclusive discounts for our subscribers.

We could also use some contributors. So if you have something you’ve always wanted to share with the world, send it in to tips@styleguidance.com and if you have anything you’d like us to write about, send those ideas to topics@styleguiance.com

Help us make this the best style newsletter out there.

Tried out reddit ads, here are the results.

I kept seeing sponsored links by reddit admins urging people to try out the reddit self serf ads, so I decided to give it a try.

If you don’t know what those are…reddit ads basically allow you to throw in a certain amount(at least $20), which then gets summed up, and divided by the dollar amount to figure out how many ads you get. If you spent $20, and the total for the day was $200, you get 10% of all ads shown for the day. Based on my observation, users get shown ads every 3-10 refreshes. The ads get displayed on the reddit home page in the upcoming stories area. And yes, the link is a nofollow so buying ads to improve your SEO won’t work.

This is the landing page that the people who clicked saw(if you notice the numbers get recalculated to show the savings). Which I think looks better compared to just linking to Amazon Kindle for example.

For this “test” I wanted to try advertising an actual product, so that I could track actual sales. I decided to advertise hosting. Why?

• Programmer sub reddit is one of the largest subreddits with more than 150K subscribers. So a large portion of reddit users are programmers
• I was already a dreamhost customer, so I could use their affiliate program w/o signing up. And their promo codes look official, making people think that you are actually the company, and not just a referrer. So my promocode(diggsucks) looked like dreamhost was giving redditors 50% off hosting.(actually I was accused of being a company employee astroturfing by saying I used dreamhost since 2004…the exact quote was “This is a sponsored link, why is a company employee trying to tell us he has used the service is completely satisfied with it? Isn’t like that like BIAS?”

From the start I wasn’t expecting a lot of results. Why? Because redditors are the worst demographic for an advertiser. They have the attention span of an infant and tend to be very cheap. But hey, $20 is not a lot of money, so I wanted to see the results for myself.

Since I wanted to see the actual effect of advertising, I avoided the “click here to find out what this link is about” click bait. The ad spelled out exactly what was being offered.

I decided to run my ad on a Saturday, since by looking at the stats for the previous week, it had the least competition and the best cpc/cpm numbers. + I figured that if someone was going to buy hosting for a blog or something, they are more likely to do it at home, and not at work.

So the ad had everything a perfect reddit ad would have.

• giving huge discounts compared to the regular pricing(50% off)
• reddit specific discount code(I went with diggsucks)

So Saturday the ad ran…and here are my results:

Here are the stats from Dreamhost:

Here are the stats from Reddit:

And here are the weekly stats. As you can see I got in on one of the lowest CPC/CPM days.

So to summarize:

• Reddit showed my ad to 19,303 unique people
• Reddit showed my ad 63,473 times.
• 199 clicks were by unique users, with about 15 people clicking twice
• The CTR was 1% for uniques, and 3x times less for totals(makes sense, few people click the same ad twice.)
• So to normalize these numbers for the web metrics: my CPM was $.31, my CPC was $.09, and my CPA was $20(and that 1 action made me back the $20 I spent).

For a comparison, you can see Gabriel’s post for promoting duck duck go search engine on reddit. But to summarize it:

• He was using the advertising to drive traffic(wasn’t selling a product)
• His CTR was 6.49% and 4 times less for totals.
• And to normalize his numbers: CPM was $1.98(he was paying more than me?) and his CPC was $.03(3x more clicks).

So how much self-serf advertising is there per day. Well let’s look at the averages(remember there were 11 advertisers on the day I ran my ad and for my $20 I got 63K impressions).

• if average was $20 - then 63K x 11= 693,000 page views
• if average was $30 - then 63K*(3/2) * 11 = 1,039,500 page views
• if average was $40 - then 63K*(4/2) * 11 = 1,386,000 page views
• if average was $50 - then 63K*(5/2) * 11 = 1,732,500 page views

I believe the average is probably somewhere between $20 and $30, so about 1 million page views/day.

My take away from the experience. Probably not worth spending more than the $20 minimum buy in. And at $20 it’s a cheap alternative for advertising, as long as you realize that you get what you pay for. So you’ll get a lot of impressions, and more hits than you would at Google for the same money…but not as many sales.

Where they need to improve:

• Targeting: Shouldn’t be hard to let advertisers select which subreddit to target. Then just prioritize the ads for that specific subreddit subscribers.
• Displaying: Probably would be a good idea to display these ads on the subreddits front page too. Advertisers get more views, and reddit makes more money.
• Paypal: it’s a trust issue. Now I trust reddit with my credit card…but I think a lot of people tend to have second thoughts about giving up their credit card info.

I made one mistake making the ad. I left the comments open. Which ended up with a negative comment at 5pm. If I ran the ad again, I’d leave those comments closed. Let the users make the decision on their own, without being affected by other people’s viewpoints. Actually I caught the mistake just before the ad went live….but I was afraid to change it, since reddit spells out that any changes need approval, and I didn’t want to lose out on ad views.

Anyways, if you want to try out reddit advertising for yourself..you can do so here.

YCombinator’s Etacts steals Ballpark’s layout

So YCombinator’s Etacts just launched today…but wait the site looks familiar.

It looks like they borrowed Ballpark’s layout. Even copied their logo’s font and all the buttons.

If you expect us to trust you with our gmail username and passwords, it’s probably not a good idea to ruin that trust by copying other people’s work.

You are a FUNDED company, amateur stuff like this should never happen.

Take a look for yourself:

New Update

Going to have another update Monday or Tuesday.

Some changes you’ll notice:

• The 2nd ad spot will now show up all the time, for those users with less than 200 reputation.
• Fixed a few badges
• If you have more than 20 rep points, you can post as many Qs/As as you want.
• Relaxed the rules for unregistered users: can create new tags, can vote.
• You won’t see the human verification captcha when you can’t post.

The changes you won’t notice, should help us get more Google traffic.

Month #3 stats

I’m just going to plug in numbers from the old post.

So it’s now been 3 months since I launched Style Guidance.

So here is the report for month #3. I’m comparing December 18th-January 17th numbers to January 18th-February 17th numbers.

• Visitors: 35K —> 64K(up 82%)
• 
• Returning Visitors: 7,491 —> 12,543(up 67%)
• Daily Visitors: 1,200—>1,500K (up 25%)
• Daily Search Engine Traffic: ~550—>~735) (up 33%)
• Contributors(anyone who asked/answered question): 1941—> 2709(up 40%)
• Questions: 1923—> 3111(up 61.2%)
• Twitter Followers: 1466—>2105(up 43.5%)
• Facebook Fans: 915—>1370(up 157%)

We also had a few other milestones, which I want to start tracking for future reports.

• Page Rank: 5(no update yet)
• Alexa Rank Global: 101,789—>76,560

StackOverflow getting VC funding is a recipe for disaster

So we find out today that StackOverflow is going to start looking for VC funding in order to expand the StackOverflow business.

Basically they are going to do a land grab, put out a ton of StackOverflow like sites, and grab the market before it’s too late. So in essence, they are going to do what StackExchange users have been trying to do for like 4 months.

The whole idea here is that they’ll put out a ton of content via Q&A sites and rank well in Google. Pretty much try to duplicate the success they had with StackOverflow.

Now as a SE owner, let me tell you why this will never work.

• community - the only reason StackOverflow grew like it did, was because Joel/Jeff had something like 50,000 fans. You can’t jump start a community. So no VC money will help here.
• lack of focus - if your entire company is focused on one thing, you can do it well; if you don’t have focus, and try to do a dozen sites at the same time, none of them will ever get anywhere. Just look at the trilogy, the sites built after SO’s success aren’t doing as well because they aren’t the true passion, and are just a way to land grab a space:
  • StackOverflow: Alexa 540
  • ServerFault: Alexa 10,485
  • SuperUser: Alexa 13,685
• SEO, StackOverflow ranks well in Google, because there is no real competition in the Programmer Q&A space(forums don’t count). But if you go for anything mainstream, you’ll be crushed by the big HowTo sites or hell even Yahoo Answers. Q&A sites by default suck at getting linked to, that’s why StackOverflow is only a PR6, while eHow is a PR8. An original content site, will almost always outrank Q&A.
• Little mainstream appeal - the StackOverflow design is fine and dandy for the programmer niche. But it is fugly for anything mainstream.
• Answers are a commodity - there are a hundred Q&A sites that have been at it for years, that have all the simple questions answered already(and indexed in Google), the only reason StackOverflow works, is because it was a niche that didn’t have the hard questions answered. There are few niches out there, that have the same parameters, that you see in the programmer niche. And if they do exist(law, finance, medicine), there is no real sense of community like you have with programmers.

Stackoverflow and StackExchange are great platforms. The problem is that they have razor thin margins. It’s not a VC business, it’s a small 2 person team company making enough to pay the bills business.

VC funding makes no sense for a StackOverflow network, they’ll never make enough money to justify the million dollar+ investment. And it’s gotta be a big investment, because these guys have plenty of money to cover the costs otherwise.

Just launch already.

Failure to launch seems to be a disease in the startup community.

Everyone is working on a ton of projects, everyone is plugging away…but noone is launching. Everyone is waiting for perfection.

WHY?!

Do you honestly believe that if you don’t release a perfect product right away, noone will care? Here is a dirty little secret…noone will care even if you do release a perfect product.

Do you believe if you don’t release a perfect product right away, that people are going to hate? Here is another dirty little secret, they’ll hate even if you launch a perfect product.

So just do it already.

There are so many advantages:

• You start aging that domain 6 months early. This leads to more Google traffic earlier, since the big G tends to give bonus points for older sites.
• You build features people want, instead of wasting time building features you think they want. You may think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but in reality that feature, that you spent 2 weeks coding, will only be useful to 2 people.
• You don’t waste your time on useless things.
  
  • Scaling - why waste time optimizing for a ton of traffic when you are getting 10 hits a day? Trust me, even if you hit traffic issues, you aren’t going to lose many users, they’ll just come back the next day.
  • Security - why waste time coding security features? Noone is going to hack a site that gets 10 hits a day. A good example here, is antileet on HN. He wrote an app like Omegle, then started fixing security holes and doing spam protection….a week later Omegle launched and took his cake. If he didn’t bother wasting time on security and spam protection, he might have been in Omegle’s shoes right now.
  • Design - no matter how nice design you make…that first one will be shit compared to your other ones. So why exactly are you spending months designing something, which will not even exist 3 months later?
• You start growing your community right away. Early community building is the hardest part…so why not get a 3-4 month head start?
• There are no more excuses. We’ve all been there, “oh we gotta finish this feature”, “oh we gotta wait till May…since statistically startups that launch in May have a bigger chance of succeeding”, “oh I gotta go save up a little bit more, so that I’ll have $$$ to pay for the 5 million users we are going to get in the first week”. No, you’ve launched, and now it’s time to get your hands dirty.
• You actually see if you are doing something productive, or if you are wasting your time.

Now, I’m not saying you do the whole press thing at this stage. No…what I’m saying is you gotta put your stuff out there, to see what the actual users think. Call it an open alpha…where you build up the product in front of a live audience.

I know you stick to programming since it’s what you are comfortable with. You are scared of marketing, you are scared of building a community, you are scared of putting yourself out there. But you gotta be willing to step out of your shell, if you want to be successful. Stuff like that only looks scary from a distance, once you go get your feet wet, it’ll only be a matter of days before you get comfortable doing these things.

So just launch already…even if you lose 90% of users who come to your site during the build process…that’s still 10% left over to help you create a product that people actually want.

Why isn’t Eric Schmidt following anyone on Google Buzz?

Does he have no friends…or does he and his friends know something that we don’t?

BTW on Twitter, the guy follows 92 people

Google profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/109938146389129062343

Twitter Profile: http://twitter.com/ericschmidt

Why is the startup culture so eager to forgive unethical behavior?

Why is the startup culture so eager to forgive unethical behavior?

Remember Zynga?

• 10/31/2009 Techcrunch started the whole Scamville issue over Zynga’s lead gen business with rebill offers.
• 01/08/2010 Techcrunch awarded the CEO of Zynga, the one they blasted just 2 months before in over a dozen posts with “CEO of the Year” award.

How about DB?

• 02/05/2010 He gets caught posting stories in exchange for compensation, I post that he is the intern in question. And everyone jumps on me for outing him.  Actual quotes:
  
  • Oh come on, he’s a teenager
  • We don’t have to out him, though. Let him privately make amends.
  • He’s 17 years old ffs. This is not appropriate content.
  • Even if he asked for something, he deserves a second chance, considering his age
  • is it really worth harming his image for it?
  • We all make mistakes as a teenager, often involving a lack of ethics.
  • I was never this dumb about stuff like this, but I was just as dumb about other stuff. I’d give him a second chance.
• The actual thread was actually deleted, and I was soft banned or soft-suspended

How about ReadWriteWeb trying to get sock puppets to post links?

• Jacques posts that he got approached by a RWW writer to submit the stuff to HN and?
  
  • the highest voted comment tells him: “This sort of submission doesn’t accomplish anything except starting arguments.”
  • another gem: “What is the big deal here?

Where’s accountability? What is it with the “boys will be boys” mentality?

Hell yeah, it’s worth harming the image over it. If you don’t want to hurt your reputation…how about this…stop doing unethical shit? Simple ain’t it?

Here is a little rule you should learn to follow….if you think you’ll be embarrassed by your behavior getting plastered on the front page of New York Times…don’t fucking do it.

So to get back to the original question…why is the startup culture so eager to defend unethical behavior? It seems like I’m the only one who cares about ethics in the startup culture.

P.S. And before you start, I’ve been on both ends of the equation. I was offered money to promote someone’s product, and I’ve been told to pony up some dough to get a post on another blog. Somehow I didn’t have a problem saying no. You don’t need balls of steel to be able to say no. I guess that’s the difference in how we were raised.

The Techcrunch intern who sold posts is Daniel Brusilovsky

All the evidence you need:

we’ve also deleted all content created by this person on our blogs.

http://www.techcrunch.com/author/danielbru/

P.S. it is fully appropriate to make the name public, nobody should ever get a free pass on unethical behavior.

P.P.S. here is my followup post…Why is the startup culture so eager to forgive unethical behavior?